The European project made war unthinkable: it deserves its Nobel Peace Prize

The EU’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize has occasioned much scornful laughter, some of it deserved. But it is worth reflecting for a moment on the underlying logic of this prize.

Tony Judt’s brilliant history of the continent, Postwar, quotes Hegel’s wistful aphorism that “world history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it”. The European Union has won the Nobel Prize for a simple reason: its post-war chapters are mostly empty, happy years – relative to the bloody centuries that preceded them.

It may be difficult for newer generations to understand this, but there was simply no guarantee that the continent would see prosperity and peace. It had suffered unimaginable ethnic cleansing, some of which was prosecuted by the victorious allies themselves. Western Europe itself was in tatters. Germany had 20 million people homeless. France had lost half a million homes just between 1944 and 1945. In France, vigilante groups would slaughter 10,000 people accused of collaborating with Nazis. Between 1945 and 1949, a majority of Germans held the opinion that “Nazism was a good idea, badly applied”. Hunger was widespread, and worsened by the vicious winter of 1947. There was no assurance that wartime resistance groups would disarm willingly.

It might be argued that, from such an enfeebled position, Europe would likely have grown rapidly anyway. But it might also have torn itself apart before it got anywhere.

Against these uncertainties, the Schuman Plan, which tied together France’s steel industry to Germany’s coke and coal supplies, and became the foundation of later European integration, was a key moment. It was an ingenious way of calming bitter Franco-German distrust, and it worked spectacularly. By 1954, France dropped its opposition to West German rearmament – a remarkable turnaround, scarcely a decade after the Nazi occupation.

Of course, the United States played a crucial role in all of this. The French would never have tolerated an armed West German state were it not for the protection of NATO, formed in 1949 with American military power at its core. As Lord Ismay famously noted that year, the point of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. The Alliance may have frayed in recent years, but it succeeded eminently in all three of those objectives, and could not have done so without US troops, tanks and nuclear weapons sprawled across Europe’s previously war-torn territory.

American cash was also important. By 1952, when the Marshall Plan finished, the US had spent $13 billion on assistance to Europe, far outstripping all its previous aid spending combined. In current terms, Marshall spending would amount to over $100 billion. All this allowed the sheltered Europeans to build up welfare states, which helped avert the extremist movements that had eased the path to war in the first half of the century.

But none of this negates Europe’s own hand in the process, as some are suggesting. After all, the United States also kept a major presence in Asia – but, there, wounds did not heal as they did in Europe. Compare the pairing of France and Germany, where war is now utterly unimaginable, with South Korea and Japan, two rivals that still view one other with considerable suspicion. Whereas Asian suspicion of Japan still lingers, and historical animosities remain fraught, genuine European fears of Germany’s military power are confined to football chants and 1970s British comedy. The transformation of Europe is much deeper. Europe could not have achieved peace without the US, but the European Union – and its institutional predecessors – was left with much work to do.

Europe’s peace was an admittedly ugly one. It included fascists, in places like Spain and Portugal, colonial atrocities, in places like Kenya and Algeria, and mass ethnic violence on its doorstep, in Yugoslavia. But members of the European project never went to war to settle their differences, and have arrived at a point where war is unthinkable. That is a stark exception in world history, and an achievement which few other groups of states can claim as their own.

There are undoubtedly other worthy laureates, such as Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani peace activist shot this week, but the European Union does have valid claims to peacemaking, and is undeserving of the torrent of cynicism unleashed against it today.